(When writing this book I was inspired by the thought that the loneliness and death which hold sway throughout this wretched world of ours can be confronted – and that art and inspiration are a wonderful way of doing this, because art and inspiration prevail over death and loneliness.)

Summary:

16 short stories about the mysteries of life in an urban space. But the big city portrayed in the book is not one we would necessarily recognise. It resembles a city in a fairy tale – filled with secrets and drama. The short stories of Kalin Terziiski aim to establish a new tradition in Bulgarian prose of humanistic and poetical urbanism.

(Memories, snapshots, slips of the tongue, suppressed thoughts, time slipping through the fingers, a desire to forget. Helplessness. Inappropriate looks. Blood on the lips. Ruin. Despair. Reminiscences. The tangled web of relationships. The fall of my axe.)

Summary:

The novel is both a history and a love story, which touches on moral issues, myths and science fiction. This family saga might also be seen as a collage or mosaic.

The main plot is set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and the 1990s and its narrative concerns the tragic stories of one family.

(Winning a prize is both a great pleasure and a special responsibility. In my opinion, literature and the arts in general provide not just an escape from a world which often hurts us but also the vision of a better one. I think that if I won the prize, it would focus attention on a type of literature which is not only entertaining but also intellectually stimulating. I would consider it a very great honour if I have helped achieve this.)

(Agrigento is a town in Sicily with an ancient history, of particular interest because on closer inspection it reflects the multiple facets of modern European culture. My faith in this culture and in every culture, which is a nation's true wealth, was the inspiration for this book, in an attempt to capture all the dynamic forces fighting in a southern European's soul.)

Summary:

Agrigento looks at what happens when a group of people, for whom ordinary life is not enough, meet in modern-day Agrigento, a town in southern Sicily with a long history, as well as one which reflects modern Sicilian culture.

Agrigento is a book that is a hymn to Sicily beyond stereotypes and preconceptions, but also a hymn to the real life we miss out on when we surrender ourselves to obsessions.

Iceland

Ófeigur Sigurðsson, Jon

Author:

1. "Ég vona að verðlaunin opni nýjar leiðir fyrir sem flesta."

(I hope that this award will open new routes for as many people as possible.)

(It focuses on a gap in the biography of the 'Pastor of Fire', Jon Steingrimsson, when he stayed in a cave during the winter of 1755.)

Summary:

In the terrible winter of 1755-1756, Jon Steingrimsson travels through Iceland, dwelling in a cave in the south and writing letters to his pregnant wife in the north.

The Reverend Jon Steingrimsson is one of the most remarkable people in the history of Iceland, and later became known as the ‘pastor of fire’. This unique novel portrays him as a young man amid the dark times of the first sparks of the Enlightenment.

(It was a profound and abiding misunderstanding about the subject of life and death, the shame of talking about it, the vow to keep quiet, respect for the dead and an attempt to bring them back, remembering them in my own words – it was like meeting with their spirits. And a journey into the depths of one's soul, entering these people through the gates of purgatory, heaven and hell).

Summary:

This short story collection reflects on different scenes of life in urban and rural areas in modern-day Latvia. Sometimes it is impossible to guess the place or time that frame these stories, which deal with 'big subjects' at the heart of human life. The stories strongly reflect the atmosphere of 21st century Europe, and make the collection one of the most important prose works published in Latvia during recent years.

In prose texts of different lengths, plots and characters are subordinated to the musical play of words and the author reveals and constructs different layers of meaning in her texts. Life is presented as a screenplay with stages that keep changing, while in the process of creative writing it is always “the heart which is her companion”.

Malta

Immanuel Mifsud,

‘Fl-Isem tal-Missier (tal-iben)’, (‘In the Name of the Father (and of the Son)’)

(This book was inspired by a diary I found, kept by a young man of 19 who joined the British Army during the Second World War. His experience in the military, coupled with his difficult childhood – fatherless, in poverty and on the streets – shaped his life and the lives of his children. That young man was my father.)

Summary:

Back from his father’s funeral, the narrator starts reading a diary his father kept as a soldier during the Second World War. The diary is very scant, almost impersonal, but it is exactly this impersonality which pushes the narrator to re-examine the personal relationship he had with his father. The narrator revisits his father’s past, as well as his own, to look for cracks in this façade, to find signs of weakness and displays of emotion.

(With 'The Son' I try to go where we don't normally go, to explore deep into the heart of what we hide from the world and even from ourselves.)

Summary:

The Son follows one night in the life of a hero with no name, a writer whose life isfalling apart.The hero is a man who can’t adapt to new times and rules. Incapable of finding inner peace, he heads into the warm, Mediterranean night, in the city of Ulcinj,where he meets an assortment of characters.

Netherlands

Rodaan Al Galidi, De autist en de postduif (The autist and the carrier-pigeon)

(I buy everything, except my underpants, from second-hand shops. In the Netherlands second-hand shops are a world of their own. Sooner or later this had to be the setting for a book! Once I saw a broken violin lying amongst all the second-hand bits and bobs and that's how it started.)

Summary:

Geert is an autistic boy and because of the way his mind works, he combines different machines in order to construct new objects. Through this, he discovers his talent of building violins out of benches, and starts a prosperous business by selling them to a German merchant. He combines this business with caring for a carrier pigeon that always returns to him after flying. The reader is permitted a strange but fascinating insight into his unusual, yet pure and innocent, mind.

(I wrote the book while I was between 40 and 50 years old, fascinated by the changes and discoveries that people experience at this age.)

Summary:

The Fairground Magician tells stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and about values that are perceptible only in exceptional moments. The narration assumes various forms, from apparent realism to various other genres, such as crime fiction, thrillers and erotic prose. Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts.

(I hope that the authors, editors and writers, whom I will meet through the prize, will carry my words beyondIstanbul and that this cultural exchange will nourish me on my path of becoming a (better) good writer (if this is my destiny).)

The stories in Exile are monologues by a variety of real-life and fictional characters. Ilhan has a wide-ranging and deep understanding of human experience and suffering, and she is capable of expressing the multi-faceted realities of life strikingly and plainly, sensitive to its pains and injustices.

United Kingdom

Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

Author:

1. I very much hope that this prize will bring me a greater closeness to my fellow European writers and readers.

2. It is hard to summarise in one sentence what inspired me to write The Quickening Maze; I could say that the book was centrally an attempt to explore questions of human freedom and integrity.

Summary:

The poet John Clare is incarcerated in an asylum in 1840. The closed world of the asylum is vividly depicted – at the centre is Clare’s own fall into madness and the delusions that convince him he is Byron, or prize-fighter Jack Randall, or even Robinson Crusoe. At the end of the book, Clare escapes and struggles homewards towards his village, not knowing that his childhood sweetheart has died in his absence.